Academic Research: Corpus-based Analysis of Whatsapp Group Chat

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Learner Corpus Mini-research: Corpus-based Analysis of Whatsapp Group Chat Law, Locky English, ESL, EFL, Corpus, Corpora, Multimodality, Internet, Smartphones, Grammar, Chat room, Group chat, Learning, Teaching, 2012-5-21 76 2012-7-11

Introduction:

In Hong Kong, adult learners of English rely heavily on face-to-face classroom instruction, which is the mainstream mode of learning. As the internet and computer technology advance, authentic resources have become highly accessible (Law, 2011) and corpora boom, data-driven learning (DDL) gradually proves to be a viable self-learning alternative to traditional one-to-many face-to-face spoon-feeding pedagogy. Computer-mediated communication has not only changed human behaviour (Law, 2011), but has gradually shifted learning paradigm. Through the use of online web-based corpora, learners are able to explore patterns, regularity and trends of any lexical items by inductive method through the internet. In this paper, a Whatsapp chat room chat log of 9 adult learners of English is analysed and three selected errors will be bombarded by corpus data to demonstrate the benefits and practicality of DDL. Towards the end of the paper, I will suggest a corpus-based pedagogy, discuss the limitations of this project and conclude by advocating DDL in cities with high mobile phone and internet penetration such as Hong Kong.

Opinions:
For those of you who would like to read academic papers written by me. Hope this will be useful for those of you researching in related areas as well.

Resources:
Learner Corpus Mini-research: Corpus-based Analysis of Whatsapp Group Chat @ Locky's English Playground
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B9emHQBd5COmZW1EMEhwMUxyck0